The best recipe boxes and meal delivery kits for easy-peasy dinners

Riverford delivers a range of recipe kits from its Devon farm to your door, using seasonal and organic fruit, veg, meat, and (wild, so not certified organic) fish for you to create the most wholesome dishes imaginable. The produce is fresh, tasty, and colourful, and packaged in 100 per cent home compostable bags ready for you to cook up a storm.

With vegan, vegetarian, dessert, salad, and other specific boxes available, there’s something to suit all tastes here, and I highly recommend the dessert kits. The Riverford courgette brownies were a genuine pleasure to make, because you don’t have the hassle of weighing out ingredients, and they taste surprisingly good for vegetable brownies. The chicken jalfrezi was a quick and easy, multi-coloured weeknight win.

There are 12 recipes a week to pick from (separate from the dessert or salad kits). Each recipe I tried was super easy to follow and required minimal prep time – just a bit of chopping and frying – before being baked, left to simmer, or mixed together in a salad bowl.

There’s no need for loads of fancy kitchen equipment with this one-pot kit. I rustled up a smoky sweet potato and black bean stew, with limited faff, a very clear method, and indeed just the one pot. The dish was hearty, healthy and went down well (even with my younger testers who are usually averse to sweet potato).

The ingredients provided are fresh, organic and of great quality, all wrapped in compostable packaging and wool for temperature-controlled items. The brand’s seasonal salad recipe kit (£14 for two to four people) also impressed. Plus, there are options for seasonal smoothie, pie recipe kit, pasta recipe kit and seasonal soups, if you fancy mixing things up a bit.

There’s only one recipe a week to pick from for each type of box, so you would need to opt to skip a week if you weren’t keen on that week’s choice. There are no dietary options, though the one-pot wonder is always vegetarian. As with most one-pot recipes, this was simple and quick to prep, and took around half an hour, including simmering time.

Gousto was one of the first recipe boxes to crop up in the UK, and it’s still going strong. With more than 180 recipes to choose from (plus plenty of dietary filters), it also offers the most choice – there is something for everyone. I picked a Korean beef bibimbap with smacked cucumber and a Sri Lankan chicken biryani with mint sambol slaw.

Both dishes were super easy to prepare, nutritious and, frankly, a lifesaver after a busy day. The extensive choice and relatively low cost mean this is the recipe box service best suited to feeding a family.

Choose from an ever-changing weekly menu of 75 recipes, which can be filtered by dietary considerations. This means the time and complexity of the recipes can differ, but all the recipes I cooked were perfectly doable on a busy weeknight, and I could get them on the table in under 40 minutes.

Another one of the original recipe box trailblazers, Hello Fresh and its easy-to-follow portioned recipes and ingredients will be familiar to many. We tried three recipes from the 42 on offer at the time of testing: Thai green chicken curry, umami miso mushroom rigatoni, and chermoula pulled chicken and halloumi flatbreads. Each recipe comes with store cupboard items and veg in a number-coded paper bag, with chilled items wrapped in wool (good) and plastic (not so good), plus reusable ice packs.

The recipes we tested were hassle-free – some took less than 20 minutes to whip up and required hardly any pots and pans, which is always appreciated on a weeknight.

Hello Chef cooks have created a wealth of recipes, so you can pick from around 50 different choices each week. There was nothing complex to do in the recipes I chose, which took around 20 minutes. Most Hello Fresh recipes are 20-40 minutes.

From exotic mushroom birria tacos to an addictively creamy sundried tomato and pesto linguine and a veg-packed gochujang mac and cheese, these recipes show just how fun and flavour-packed vegan dishes can be with a little know-how.

The recipe cards are cool and colourful, with full nutritional breakdowns and a curated Spotify playlist for each dish. Meanwhile, the instructions are clear and easy to follow, and ingredients are helpfully portioned out into (plastic) sachets. This is a great kit if you want to get out of a plant-based rut and pick up some new skills.

Grubby offers 18 recipes to choose from per week, which are, of course, all vegan. While you can’t filter the recipes or your subscription according to further dietary concerns, it is easy to pick recipes without common allergens, such as wheat. The recipes vary in terms of time and complexity; none of them are technical or tricky, but many involve different processes and pans. That said, it’s all fast. I found that none of them took longer than 35 minutes.

Working on those gains? Or perhaps you’re cutting carbs or giving keto a go? Green Chef comes nutritionist-approved and can help you stick to your diet without having to put much thought into it. Choose from veggie, vegan, pescatarian, high protein and more, then select your favourite recipes of the week.

I loved the keto duck breast with cauliflower cheese, and vegetarian red pepper chilli jam halloumi tacos were ready in minutes, proving a family favourite. I think it offers great value, too.

Green Chef boasts around 39 recipes to pick from on the weekly carousel, and they don’t get much more diet-specific than this. The recipes I picked were very basic and took under 40 minutes each – much of that was cook time rather than hands-on, which is how I like it.

Seafood fans will enjoy tucking into Rick Stein’s box of fresh Cornish fish. The large Cornish fish box includes six plump scallops in their half shell (I highly recommend barbecuing them with the included hazelnut coriander butter), hake fillets, sea bass fillets and dressed crab for two, along with a luxurious fish mix.

You can create a full-on seafood feast featuring Rick Stein’s meen kulambu curry, emmental-topped fish gratin or his famous Newlyn fish pie – you’ll need to pop to the shops for a few fresh ingredients, though. The quality of the fish is fantastic, and instructions couldn’t be clearer, so don’t worry if you tend to be intimidated by fish cookery.

There is a range of different-sized and themed fish boxes available from Rick Stein, including ready-to-eat seafood platters or a smoked box. The cookery was very easy, and dishes were ready in as little as 10 minutes. The longest, the gratin, only took 40 minutes.

Fine-dining restaurants pivoted to delivering dishes during lockdown, and Indian restaurant The Cinnamon Club is still offering the chance to eat some of its most popular and delicious dishes at home. This four-course meal kit from celebrated chef Vivek Singh saves you a pricey trip to Westminster.

It offers a mix-it-yourself street-food-inspired bhel papdi chaat with tangy tamarind and green chutney; a shrimp pepper fry starter with divine Indian coastal flavours; and a slow-braised Kashmiri lamb shank rogan josh that melts in the mouth. There’s a vegan kit too, if you don’t eat meat.

Together with a 24-hour simmered black daal, biryani rice and all the trimmings, this is an incredibly indulgent and luxurious home-dining experience. It requires little more than a bit of frying and heating up, too. Pudding is in the form of a steamed garam masala pudding with toffee sauce and nutmeg custard, if you can squeeze it in. While this is designed for two people, in practice, it could easily feed four. It’s an expensive treat but a truly memorable one.

There are no other options to choose from in the feast at home menu; Vivek is sticking to the classics here. However, if requested in advance, it may be possible to cater to certain dietary requirements and allergies. The preparation and cooking were uncomplicated and required no cooking skills. I managed to prepare all the dishes at once within 30 minutes.